QConsolidate - Packaging QGIS Projects for Sharing
After trialing many of the different avaliable plugins for my own use to get projects to and from clients, I have found a way of sharing projects that seems to work quite well. The QConsolidate plugin for QGIS. Below is my current workflow. Some notes before beginning:
Your QGIS project must be saved as a .qgs, not a .qgz
You must have saved the project you’re working on before attemping to consiolidate it elsewhere
They output format will be the project (.qgs) file, together with a folder called ‘layers’
QConsolidate will convert database layers into shapefiles, and rewrite the project file to the new shapefile
It is best to perform the consolidation onto your local harddrive, as trying to write to an external drive/usb, will be considerably slower.
Install the QConsolidate3 plugin
2. If you have any large raster files (e.g. regional radiometrics/geophysics) in the project, clip these down to the specific area of interest, or remove them from the project and send them seperately, as sufficently large rasters will cause QGIS to crash whilst consolidating. (Utilise the SCP Plugin to clip and restretch rasters)
3. If you have created and are utilising a .MBTiles basemap, remove this and send seperately, as it seems QConsolidate can’t deal with this type of file
4. Open the QConsolidate3 plugin. Type a project name and set an output directory
5. Pick either .shp or .gpkg, depending what you are familiar/comfortable with
6. If you are going to re-add your .MBTiles or large raster files after consolidating, UNTICK ‘Consolidate in a Zip file’
7. If you have .MBTiles/Rasters to re-add, copy these files into the ‘Layers’ directory that was created, open the consolidated project’s .qgs and bring the .MBTiles/Rasters into the project. Save and close the project.
8. Zipp the folders and send off to your intended destination
note: The additional project.qgs~ file is a backup. Simply rename and remove the ~ and it will work. You don’t need to include this in the .zip.
